Storage innovations tailored to meet business productivity needs

BANGALORE, INDIA: The amount of data being stored today is growing exponentially - IDC estimates that the size of the "digital universe" will grow to 35ZB by 2020, up from 4ZB in 2013, which is almost 50 percent more than 2012 volumes.

With data doubling every two years, the speed at which it can be stored, retrieved, used and protected can make or break an enterprise's IT service, the question then is, can companies keep up with this data growth and in a way that adds value to the business rather than risk and cost?

Driven by new innovations and continuing growth in big data, cloud and mobility, storage is in the spotlight as one of the key fundamental building blocks within an IT infrastructure. In many cases, the performance and efficiency of a company's storage systems play a big role in enabling or hindering the value an application or cloud service brings to an enterprise.

Over the years, the dramatic growth in data generation has put increased stress on organization's existing infrastructure and has impacted all strategic decisions made by CEOs and CIOs. There are a number of reasons for this.

Traditional storage solutions are increasingly becoming inadequate in managing and extracting maximum business value. As these are purchased, deployed and maintained separately, it results in data silos thus making the procedure slower and inefficient. In addition, IT organizations typically make purchase decisions on storage investments based on past experiences with performance as an afterthought.

This neglects the fact that the growth in data capacity is often unpredictable and can create challenges for determining when existing storage will pass a certain capacity threshold and begin to affect performance. Thus, the solution is to over-provision to ensure that applications don't run out of storage capacity and performance remains efficient.

Furthermore, with growing regulatory requirements data retention, having an adequate storage infrastructure in place is increasingly essential for maintaining data securely for the long term.

With those problems in mind, IT leaders are looking at best-of-breed storage technologies that are engineered to run applications faster and more efficiently, increase business productivity and reduce costs. Recent advancements in technology are now powering storage systems to deliver these benefits and can enable enterprises to:

- Accelerate business applications and increase user productivity

- Address larger user populations

- Protect increasing amounts of enterprise data

- Replace more costly and complex storage infrastructures

- Retain data to meet long-term compliance requirements

- Deploy cost-effective storage solutions that have ample room to grow

To gain superior performance, solutions are becoming available that help companies better match the storage device to the needs of the application throughout the information lifecycle.

An advancement that is observed in real-time is dynamic application-aware performance and health analytics. Supported by an easy-to-use management interface that reduces the requirement for additional training and helps take the guesswork out of system installation, configuration, and tuning.

The DTrace Storage Analytics software enables customers to visualize CPU, cache, protocol, disk, memory, networking and system-related data-all at the same time. It is supported by an easy-to-use management interface that reduces the requirement for additional training. This level of visibility also helps administrators to quickly find and troubleshoot issues and bottlenecks affecting the system performance, minimizing any
impact to business productivity.

In fact, an independent study showed that DTrace Storage Analytics, a standard feature of Oracle ZS3 Series storage systems, enables customers to troubleshoot 44 percent faster with 38 percent less complexity, resulting in estimated savings in admin costs up to $27,000 per system per year.

In other areas, new compression technologies, can help companies to reduce the amount of storage by as much as 90 percent leading to considerable savings through storage cost avoidance, including data center infrastructure, cooling, switches, conduit, cables, racks, floor space, and maintenance.

As a result, users can then reduce the total amount of storage needed, maximize the utilization of current storage.

In summary, modern storage innovations are enabling enterprises to address the immediate challenge of how to increase storage performance and improve operational efficiencies. By reducing administrative time and data center expenses and at the same time, increasing business application performance, modern storage solutions can accelerate time to insight and mitigate business risk.

These new storage systems also deliver extreme storage performance as organizations move to a future of more consolidated, virtualization-driven private cloud environment.

The Author is vice president, Systems Business, Oracle India